Warning: This article contains spoilers about The Masked Singer season 4 finale.
Happy Masked Singer season 4 finale! What a season it’s been, and boy was it a fun distraction. Did we need TMS during a pandemic? Maybe not. Are we glad we got it? Totally. It gave us Mickey Rourke’ssurprise self-elimination, Wendy Williams’ hilariously chaotic performance (which became a hit on TikTok), the mildly cursed Masked Dancerteasers, and so much more.
Plus, viewers got to catch up with celebrities they haven’t thought about in a few years. Your favorite TV dad from childhood? Yeah, he’s wearing a furry suit singing CCR on stage. And the football star who fumbled on his butt? He’s controlling an intergalactic puppet doing an Eastern European accent. In a year of uncertainties, it was weirdly comforting to see these faces on our screens.
But enough masking poetic, onto the show! The first of the two-hour TMS block was a Road to the Finals special, featuring interviews with this season’s contestants and a few new clues for our finalists. Then, it was time to get to the last showdown between Crocodile, Mushroom, and Sun.
Croc gave us one of his best performances with Journey’s “Open Arms.” And in the spirit of the holidays, he gifted his clue, an angel figurine, to Jenny McCarthy. The panelist joked it was fitting for her as it was “just as plastic,” which made us cackle.
Then it was Mushroom’s turn, and he sang Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish,” which he said was his daughter’s favorite song. His onstage clue, a mushroom cookie dough ice cream, was for Nicole Scherzinger.
Last, but definitely not least, was Sun with Brandi Carlile’s “The Story.” Her gift was a mistletoe to Robin Thicke.
“You can kiss yourself for hours,” Ken Jeong joked (Don’t listen to him Robin, Ken’s just jealous he was left in the cold, as is tradition on this show).
Host Nick Cannon then announced the third place winner, as voted on by the panelists, studio audience, and super fans at home. Bronze went to Crocodile!
He may not have put on as many show-stopping performances as Sun and wasn’t as vocally versatile as Mushroom, but Croc still delivered some memorable performances. And he hit Cannon with his tail once, so we salute him for that too.
The emcee then revealed what the panelists wrote down back in episode 2, for their Croc first impression guesses. Jeong had Bradley Cooper, but he changed his mind to Nick Lachey, who coincidentally was Scherzinger’s first thought. Her final prediction, Jordan Knight, was Thicke’s initial pick. He ultimately went with Backstreet Boy Howie Dorough. McCarthy, the panelist to beat with three correct guesses so far, stuck with her first guess, Howie D’s bandmate Nick Carter.
Crocodile was revealed to be … Nick Carter!
As EW explained in our prediction post, there were lots of boy bander clues, plus specific nods to Carter. The pirate flag in Croc’s second clue package referenced the singer’s die-hard love for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (he has a tattoo of the team’s logo, a pirate flag) and the contestant’s story about his father not believing in him corresponded to a passage in Carter’s autobiography.
The blue and black heart-shaped cookies in the Road to the Finals tonight were of course a reference to the Backstreet Boys song “Shape of My Heart” from the album Black & Blue.
Check back as we update with the season 4 winner and the final unmaskings!
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